Online-communication mechanisms, such as social-networking websites, professional-networking websites, e-commerce websites, and user-generated content websites (such as YOUTUBE and WIKIPEDIA), allow computer users to communicate with, meet, and exchange information and goods with others in a variety of ways. In order to facilitate such communication, many of these online-communication mechanisms automatically generate or require users to create publicly-viewable user profile pages.
Unfortunately, some publicly-viewable user profile pages may contain hidden private data that, while not visually displayed when the page is rendered by a web browser, may nonetheless be extracted from the page. For example, the code used to render a social-networking user profile may contain information that identifies the age and location of the user, even if this sensitive information is not visually displayed when the webpage is rendered in a web browser. This can be especially problematic for social-networking sites used by minors, since this hidden private data may be extracted and used by predators.